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Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 - February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science sociology and was a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. With almost a thousand, often very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century. Simon was not only a polymath, but a truly innovative thinker. He was among the founding fathers of several of today's most important scientific domains, including artificial Intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, attention economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery. He coined the terms bounded rationality and satisficing , and was the first to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions. Simon's genius and influence is evidenced by the many top-level honors he received later in life. These include: the ACM's Turing Award for making "basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing." (1975); the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978); the National Medal of Science (1986); and the APA's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (1993).
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